


Hate is Love and Love is Hate

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexuality, F/M, Perversion and Hatred, Pseudo-Incest, Sex and Loathing, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Vantablack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:36:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26552959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: She hates him enough to dance for him in high black heels and a put-on smile over black painted lips in a murky place where you set your dignity aside at the door.  He hates himself enough he watches.Because of him, she doesn't have a home.  She wants to take him back to one you rent by the hour and gouge the tears from his eyes with kisses.Redemption happens to other people.
Relationships: Amelia Novak/Jimmy Novak, Castiel/Claire Novak
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	Hate is Love and Love is Hate

**Author's Note:**

> Vantablack, perverse, and with angst grown-up into madness. Yeah, it's another Starkarm. What? Sink deep into the black place and let the the cold dirty feelings curl up in your gut.

He watches me dance because he loves me. Or at least, that's what he tells himself. I can see it in his face, in the forever smudge of stubble on his cheeks like a three-day bender reaching its end. The way his eyes are half-down but they prick up when the music picks up and I feel them on my skin. More and more of it. More of his eyes. More of my skin. The feeling like a sunset in reverse; the crepuscule of hunger when the pinks and lavenders and lilacs leak into the dusty gray on the horizon and it's autumn and cool without ever being cold, when you can taste the ghost of a warm day in the breezes the rustling trees show.

I make him watch me dance because I hate him.

Or at least, that's what I tell myself.

It's so easy to tilt your eyes up under big lashes teased out with mascara and tell the guy with the greasy shirt pulled tight over a paunch from too much beer and arms with memories of strength from chucking around the ol' pigskin and pretending all the locker room fudgepacking was just awl in good fun, y'know, flatter the blank piggy eyes in the half-darkness, plaster yourself with enough makeup you're not old and you're not young but you're in that place suspended between them in plausibility's negative spaces.

They've always got names like Curtis or Wade or Lyle or, Christ, maybe Leon or LeRoy or Wayne. The guy here's Wade and his face looks like god got bored midway and just kind of tossed together everything under his shrinking hairline invading a thinning swirl of dusty gray-speckled blond. The way the fat blurs the face and takes away the humanity and especially the masculinity but you've got to give that vamp, _Oh, please, don't ever hurt me_.

The place looks like a dump from the interstate and sure enough just like no hooker's got a heart of gold the inside says the first impressions are always right. It's a one-storey lump of faded brick and weathered wood with a shitty shingled roof and a neon sign blasting its Wade's GirlsGirlsGirls siren's song hot red like a coyote's scream in the night to every freak and creep and jerkoff with a few singles in his wallet and no prospects of ever seeing or touching a girl like the one doing her damnedest to put herself through college, no shit, this one's for real, a bonnafeyed college girl named Merlene but she calls herself Consuela when she does her bump-and-grind.

She's a cheerleader goddess in size-seven-mediums, plastic shoes with three-inch heels a sharp tick and click and for having a bronze tinge in her skin she's got none of that Latin rhythm her name tries to dream. But it doesn't matter with the magic incantation. _32E_. She's a received teen-cream, just nineteen, in a camp ruffled white skirt traced with scarlet and a matching top that barely reaches under her nipples in wide brown areolae perky and big forever tightened because she ices them before she steps out on stage because Moanique told her it gets the morons hysterical at a glance.

It's probably true. I always watch Consuela before I go on because I know if she's good the tips won't be worth it, they'll be tapped out, all the mongoloids with their flat stupid faces wooden like cartoon hoodlums in a 'fifties movie, and I won't even bother getting close.

If she screws up they'll be antsy and trying to pretend to be bored in the presence of acreages of naked female skin because they know it's all smoke and mirrors, and not just the streaked glass where you see yourself in a Droste Effect, always faraway enough they don't have to see themselves.

Moanique is black and a minor goddess with the kind of tits that look like a pair of water balloons the size of watermelons packed to bursting with fat, jiggly and sweet. She's got chunky legs but it doesn't matter when she's on six-inch stilettos she wears like tennis shoes, when she's got a lipo'd tummy and she looks like a Barbie doll with blackberry skin glittering with sweat and she goes down on her back on the lapdance table, when the big-spender morons with the groping hands take little swipes out of her dignity for a touch, linger too long on her ass, and when she smiles it looks like she means it when her eyes say she can't.

The place is a pit, and I'm not only talking about the way even the sawdust scattered on the lumpy old floor creaking and scuffed with ten million workers' boots is crispy with old blood and teeth and puke.

Wade's reeks like liquor in all its levels of digestion and the bar- tip your bartender, ladies'n'gennlumen- is presided over by Wade himself, the slope-headed hick with the mouth like some deep-sea creature who carries around a dripping medium of his own sweat and filth. He wafts a nostril-punching presence like he sees bathing as a biweekly hazard.

All I had to do was pull up my top and let him look at the fake ID telling him I'm eighteen, let's not get too ambitious, and besides isn't there the joy in fresh tight skin without even a kiss of an orange in it, too young, of course it's too young, well-exercised but a thin drapery of springy teenage fat. Watched the eyes get stupid and settle on my nipples instead of the words and it was easy.

I've been dancing here for the past twelve weeks and it's like Moanique, well, her real name's Cassie, says: If there's a worse job in the world, it's prolly down in Mexico.

Figured I would've caught one of the hunting funboys' eyes in the audience. Three guesses which one it was with the eyes getting stupid with the afterglow before the foreplay and the first two don't count.

And the short-ass funboy told _him_.

It's why he's there every night I dance. I know I caught him working that saintly voodoo bullshit with one of the bouncers: You will tell me when, ah, the way the name caught in his mouth and he chewed it down and swallowed it back, you will tell me all the nights when Candi dances.

That's Candi-with-an-I. At least, that's what's on the fake ID. I dance as Tuesday now. Just an epiphany.

How can you help it? If you're not a Candi, maybe you're a Chastity, or a Chrissie, or maybe you're a Vicki-with-an-I. But Candi it was because there wasn't one there already shaking her ass by some minor miracle.

"Hey, yer mystery man's here." Kelli-with-an-I, three kids and living in a motel room I crashed at once 'cause I was too wasted to think about getting home any other way, a place with faded bedspreads that used to be floral print maybe forty years ago right off the interstate, a no-tell hellhole with lot lizards wearing suits of wind-chapped iguana skin and crinkled lips puckered around cheap Marlboros looking like fifty miles of bad pavement outside she looks at with eyes that only get worried when she sees them like a premonition of a fate worse than death.

Kelli-with-an-I's pretty in the way you can't really place, because there's nothing about her except she has an aura, makes her look like you're centered on her with binoculars and she turns into the only thing you can look at. Even in something like what they call our dressing room, which is a fusty anteroom with a few half-dead bulbs washing yellow on your skin in front of a mirror with two little tables scattered with makeup and brushes and other crap parceled out by the honor system.Figures the honestest people I ever met are part-time hookers and table dancers. When there's not enough to go around, you start to learn quick just how important sincerity is.

She's fidgeting around, leaning half-outside, top off with her perky boobs, B-cups at most, but she tells dumbasses they're Ds 'cause they can't tell the difference, wig half off her head, cheap tacky truck stop waitress platinum blonde tonight, thong bristling with singles and a few fives and a twenty from one of the big-spenders.

Kelli-with-an-I's slender and almost shapeless, skin like fresh milk with a few freckles around her nothing-there butt, and she doesn't wear her age or her life at all in a face that looks like a child's even when she's got a fresh set of bruises I have to paint with foundation from the sometimes-boyfriend sometimes-pimp named Duane with a face like a Halloween mask stuck on a pair of meaty shoulders.

"Oh?" I watch the girl in the chipped grimy mirror in the bad lights. The way the you can smooth down the cheeks with foundation so they're not chubby and etch away the awkward shapes with contour and the eyes are blue puddles between heavy black-shadowed shores like the way the iron gets inky in the sands around Lake Michigan where he used to take me.

But he's not there anymore.

"Yeah. He's real good-lookin', too. Who is he, anyway?"

"Just a guy." The laugh doesn't sound right on Claire's lips but it's perfect for Tuesday's, glossed two-inches thick with dripping black gloss you can feel tightens every pair of pants in the place when they see it wrapped around them, on your knees like some visitorstepping out of an erotic nightmare. The sharp white teeth and the too-blonde hair like a mockery of it all, smooth ringlets swirled down my shoulders.

The goth-slut put-on with a choker's onyx pinch around my neck dangling a cheap fake ruby, too red, too much like blood to be real. See the collarbone surfacing through skin looking like it's seen the sun about once or twice in the last sixteen years.

The big breasts fountaining out of a one-size-too-small black top with a kiss of a midriff and the skirt like a glorified belt showing off the seam between flesh and fabric dimpled by the stockings looking like india ink glowing on my skin. The creaky heels colored like the darkness outside Moanique taught me to dance in without face meeting runway.

"He's not just a guy. He's always there. Like, is he yer, y'know, boyfriend, er...?"

"What? You want to take him out? Be my guest." Tease and toss my hair. Run my fingers through it, watch it bounce.

"Uh, nah. Y'know how Duane is." So he's not pimping her ass this week, huh?

"Duane's a pig. You should just send him to the slaughterhouse. Fuck him if you want. My guy there. I'm sure he'd ram your pussy 'til it's in your neck." Kelli-with-an-I gets that giggle like she can't believe what she heard, and I never know if it's 'cause it's coming out of my lips or just anybody's.

"C-Candi, no way, that's..."

"I'm serious. He'll have your ankles around your ears." Turn and Kelli-with-an-I's got her wig off totally now, soft black hair you wouldn't think she'd have barely reaching her thin shoulders. It feels like satin under your fingers when she's weepy and wasted and she sets her head on your lap like a puppy and you can feel something move between your thighs, someplace deep, someplace you don't especially know if you want to touch, hot and dripping.

"Candi! You're- you're so nasty." Giggling like this is just locker room girl-talk after gym.

I should be there.

Look at her face and I hate her. I hate her and I hate the walls, the way there's that old moth-eaten fake oriental vanity screen with my street clothes thrown over it.

I hate the sudden hush and the dipshit DJ-slash-MC's voice like a backed up toilet, _And get reaaaaaaady, but ready or not, any day of the week, it's your favorite_ _nasty girl you'll never tell yer wife or girlfriend about,_ _set your calendars to her, keep a day open for her,_ _Tuesday!_

"You're up, huh?"

Pass by Kelli-with-an-I and I want to tell her: Go to hell.

Not because I hate her.

Just because.

"Wish me luck, huh, Kelli?"

"Good luck, Candi." I want to kiss her, too. I want to wrap my fingers around her cheeks, prick her soft skin and mark it with too-long nails for what I want to do to her, all lacquered in black.

The place swims with murk and time peels away from you when you step onstage like a bad dream. The way the music starts up with a hard sawing guitar and the bass thuds and you can still hear your heart in your neck, you can still hear your heels with the slow perfumed sashay.

The place is too big to have every one of the harvest of broken condoms and hasty sister-fucking coitus in some hayloft somewhere crushed up against the stage and tossing you cash, and too small to melt them away into a faceless inquisition under the low smothering ceilings.

The stink of stale bodies and cigarettes invades my nose when I move closer to the pole, closer, but that's the tease, isn't it?

"What're you assholes looking at, huh?!" They love it. Love the punk girl with the fake nose ring and the fuck-finger up at them when she swings her hips and scatters the smell of something they'll never touch at their liquor-charred lumps. When she gets down on her knees and splays her thighs and rolls on her back, plants her heels on the stage that feels like the one in junior high and that was just three years ago, wasn't it, rocks and heaves her hips and there's already the encouraging few tufts of green blown at me.

The way I can look into some moron's face with the red-meat quality of some old-timey Tammany Hall thug, the way you can see the greasy brown fringe under an orange trucker's cap, and see the eyes go glassy and dim like a teddy bear's. Reach out on your elbows and knees with heels grazing your ass and the beauty in the mirrors is a confection of soft round shapes and hard lean angles, the taut belly and bubbly butt you could bounce a quarter off and Moanique has done it more than once, _Gawddamn, girl, you got a black girl's butt_ _, don't let that one go_ , _almost_ touch his chin.

And pull away.

It's the tease. That's all it is.

A stripclub is consumer sadism and consumer masochism all in the same misfiring neurons without the two ever touching each other.

They hate you.

They hate you because they'll never really have you.

They hate you because they want you miserable and surrendering to them when they open their wallets like they're opening their belts and their flies.

They hate themselves because they'll never feel it like they do with you when they're with their wives and their girlfriends, the cold wall of denial, knowing it'll never stay faraway and with the perfect alibis between you.

Lean back and let your hair spill over the floor, your thighs slide open and give them a kiss of a hot darkness between them. The place isn't a bottomless club. God knows why it matters when the dancers turn tricks in the back rooms and the local pig-fucker sheriff with his eyes the color of stale whiskey and puffy face and gut belonging in the Smithsonian is a regular with Pastor Dillis, the local divine with the head of a hog a-ragin' and a-roarin' from the pulpit 'gin sin an' gin an' especially panhandling for more between screwing seven-year-old girls.

Pastor Dillis is there right now. I can feel the five he floats over with a pucker in his rubbery lips crease my skin. It's enough for a smile you don't feel.

The way their eyes slide up and down your shoulders and your hips when you get back up. When you heave yourself at the pole, music rolling over, you've only got as long as you pay for, yeah, you rent the fuckin' stage, go figure, and I've got three songs, all of them dark and bass-heavy with screaming guitars.

And then I catch his face. The way he lives two lives in one body. The way it's a bright smile over a birthday cake flickering with eleven candles over vanilla buttercream and the words on his pink lips.

_I'm not your_ -

Fuck that.

Fuck you.

Mouth the words to him: _Watch me, daddy_.

They think it's for them. They want it to be them. But he's there. The man named Jimmy, mom's voice soft and echoing through the door when they think I can't hear, the bed's creak and the headboard's rhythmic gallop against the wall, louder, harder, _Jesus, oh, Jesus, Jimmy, Jimmy, you're- yeah, yeah, keep- faster, faster, faster_.

I watched them once.

Just once.

The door not totally closed and I was, huh, eleven I think. First you say it's morbid fascination but then you know it's not. The way you've always had a vague flash of something when you see the prince's Disneyfied ideal gallant smiles and iron-banded muscle and then there's dad at the pool, dad with the goofy smile and hair matted with water reeking of chlorine, the other girls with the idiot grins of future masturbators in their pointless bikinis or bland one-pieces and no shapes at all.

The soft murmurs.

_Ohmygawd, your dad's **hot**._

_Like, are those abs? My dad doesn't have abs._

Sex-ed.

The penis, the vagina, the...

The door's _just_ open, and your mother's a woman, too, and you don't understand how, don't understand how the graceful Disney queen who still swans over your bed to tuck you in in a haze of vanilla-and-orange perfume with her generous sweaters and her mom jeans can be wearing that, can have her honeyed hair plastered with sweat to her cheeks and shoulders, can have her slender shapes welded into a bustier a half-size smaller than her skin and be wearing stockings you know are stockings instead of panythose you've seen her roll on before church with her prissy floral dresses, can be wearing heels you've never seen on her feet, on her belly with palms on daddy's ass and it's hard, muscular, and she's wrapping red-painted lips around his cock.

The word you only heard other girls talking about.

_Yeah, it's, like, my brother was jerking his cock. I heard it. Seriously. Ew._

_I saw my dad's once. It was, like, kinda big, I guess? I closed the bathroom door **super** -fast._

Yes.

Yes.

It's his cock. It's big and the illustrations because they're just illustrations, a few lines and streaked drab flesh-colored paint in a book, in a pamphlet, and she's working it deeper until his balls in a smooth pouch brush her chin.

She coughs wet and daddy's fingers tighten in her hair.

_Amelia, Amelia, I- oh, god, can you keep it- yeah_.

The way it comes out trailing gluey spit marbled with what you know is semen from the books except it's cum because that's how it's called, right, and the blood's beating your brain to death, and you're on your knees in the blacked-out hallway with light moving red over the walls with their shadows larger-than-life.

A hand dropped between my thighs squeezed tight together.

The penis.

The vagina.

His cock inside her, mom's thighs splayed apart, arms outstretched, _God, Jimmy, hold me, tighter, tighter, god, go faster. Faster._

Mommy.

Daddy.

Amelia and Jimmy.

In profile.

Movement.

Violence.

Watch me, daddy.

Tracing out the words, again and again, thighs straining and heels hooked around the pole's stalk, a feeling like some overused gas station pump, the feeling of bare metal draped in your sweat and a hundred other girls', the feeling of movement, hair free and surrendering to gravity when you don't, when you can't, serpentine swirling strength with your abs screaming and leaning out like a black flag in flesh.

Open your eyes and the world's upside-down.

He's still there, exactly where he should be, Jimmy, Daddy, Castiel, the man with the forever three-day stubble like coffee grounds on his cheeks and chin and his trench coat never goes stale and dirty and his blue tie half-fastened against a white shirt like some civil servant.

And maybe that's what he is. Heaven is a bureaucracy, which I'm pretty sure makes it no different than hell except for the costumes.

Let my fingers crawl up through my hair, tease it, toss it, everything running bright with sweat. Slippery over my cheeks and still not smudging the heavy goth pancake and down my shoulders. Pop my top with a thumb and watch the mania riot through their eyes when pink nipples almost crease my chin.

He won't look away. Won't look away with a fingertip brushed oh so close to my lips.

Watch me, daddy.

_Fuck me_ , daddy.

With your eyes.

Touch yourself under the table. The flesh's hungers.

Isn't that what he warned me about?

The man with your face and your body? The man with the warm smile but the faraway eyes? The man who never looked at me like that, and maybe never looked at anybody like that, the innocence doesn't even come from sincerity but self-hatred?

I can feel it. Castiel, Daddy, Jimmy, they're all there and nobody's there, a snap of movement through a heavy curtain of blonde hair starting to go flat like day-old soda with the sweat sinking down my neck, beading down my forehead.

The cheers, all the cheers, and the darker guttural sounds, the half-heard, _Goddamn, lookit them titties, lookit that..._

Lookit that ass.

_Hey, what if that was yer daughter?_

Laughing. A shoulder slugged and one of the dumbfuck truckers twisting around to his friend and the usual bark.

_I'd fuckin' lock her in her room, she was like that._

Sinking slowly inexorably to the ground with the song screaming on, harder, yeah, but never any higher. It's always flat, rasping whispers you can't even hear when you shrink back into yourself and there's nothing there so you're scattered around the room, suspended in prismatic drops of sweat.

Tits free and there's the mongoloid wails striking up when you do what you're pretty sure _only_ you do. Moanique's too heavy for it and Consuela doesn't have the coordination for it and Kelsi-with-an-I doesn't have the chest for it: Squeeze them tight against your chin, let your tongue snake out, just a little snap of movement with your nipples pushed together, skin on skin on skin, a circuit thrown closed and suddenly I'm riding the lighting and their faces go dead, go blank, they're not even a chorus of your accusers and not the hungry moronic middle-aged men with the stink of delusion and imagined nostalgia muddling the cheap rotgut and dumbass young guys with testosterone poisoning but they're just a gallery of eyes.

They're only eyes out there. Ten thousand eyes, all of them on me, but the eyes I really feel are his. The only one who matters when my shoulders hit the floor; when my ass wraps around the clammy metal and I show just how well I learned the splits when he'd take me to gymnastics classes, but I didn't look like this, wasn't wearing this, and was there still a twitch of something when he'd see me flooded with sweat and hair unraveling and red-faced in a leotard swirled with pink and black?

Was this the flesh's hungers?

Fingers trailing up my belly. Feel the flatness that comes from too much exercise and not enough food, that cold faraway place you inhabit when you don't really care, when it's not even about money but the rage in living, up and up and up between my thighs.

Cheers and whistles and the skirt's pushing around sweat in big sticky drops and it's so close, so close.

Timed to the second.

The third song ends and it's not even a blackout but a flurry of cash. Tits and skin and blonde hair and black lips, that's enough to buy a week's groceries sometimes. Nine minutes of work and a lifetime's dignity, tip the bartender, give the fucker his cut, and the MC like he's anything except something to tune out.

_Let's have a round of applause and make it rain for our **faaaaabulous** Tuesday!_

But I don't take a hike off the stage. Not right away. Not when there's still the time to make a production out of a rite like a dying plant scooping up drops of rain in a desert. On your knees, a fingernail scratched on some scritchy rasping chin, feel the stubble but that's not ever how daddy's felt like, was it?

Listen to the bucket seat head-shrinkers.

_Gawddamn, daddy issues, huh?_

_Wonder what lucky guy getsta sort out them, huh?_

_Hurhurhur_.

You couldn't imagine.

No. For real, retards. You'd have to have an imagination for this one.

Look at Moanique and you wonder: Cassie, is your daddy here, too, or is this just a job for you? Pack the dollars in your skirt, well, even a fifty in the blizzard, and you're sure as hell not asking 'em if they want change.

I can see his face. The way it's always in the frame between hard and soft and he doesn't know where it belongs, so instead it's nowhere. I want to call out to him. Not his name; not daddy's name; not anything.

_Yo, Outis_.

Would that be the right one?

Step off the stage instead of heading back, feel the crowd melt around you, hear the fingers go frozen, wondering if it's worth getting some back alley dental surgery courtesy of Wade and fists like cinderbocks just for a touch.

It'll last forever, won't it? Ain't that the point, knowing there won't be the words, won't be the sights, won't be the blank looks and won't be the walls behind their heads, won't be the eyes trembling or hard and twisted-up hands and the nights spent staring up at the ceiling wondering where the hell everything went wrong.

Easy. Like jerking off to a video.

And not.

There's the lingering image. None of the electronic soft-focus, no takes, nothing but sharp hard reality even blurred with misty fug of stale cigarettes and booze and a dark room polishing off the rough edges from girls who aren't girls.

You step through them and the bodies part with a grudging stamp of boots. You're a queen, the tyrant of their dreams and their fantasies, the place where everything that could've been lives when you're six or seven or even seventeen and floating through the phantom potential where everything is open to you through the lens narrowing light to bleak gray-green on the chalkboard.

You don't want to wake up.

I don't want to go to sleep. Not when the dreams can get worse than the nightmare. I laugh because there's nothing more hateful than a laugh with those eyes, the eyes nobody sees. You look at them and they fade to black and fade away because they can't take the eyes, the eyes that will judge them, the eyes that will laugh, the eyes they know from ten thousand fantasies and a thousand and one nights of reality, the eyes telling them everything they don't want to hear.

I read once a prof asked the fifty girls in a class and the fifty boys what they were afraid of.

The girls were afraid the boys would rape them, beat them, kill them.

The boys were afraid the girls would laugh.

He isn't laughing and I can't stop when heels _click_ up to his table.

"Daddy." My voice sounds like sweat in a closed room. He won't look away. The little one had to remind Castiel, Daddy, Jimmy, who's even in there now, but the little one had to remind him to blink.

_Humans blink, man. Didn't'cha get the memo?_

_Oh, yes. Of course._

And then I watched him try it on fifteen times. Just to be sure.

I can see his face.

_I'm not your father_.

"C-"

"Tuesday." He's sitting alone. No one will sit with him and they don't know why, and they'll never know why.

"Please-"

"You want a lapdance, right? I saw you looking at me the whole time. It's my time for it. I think you look nice, old man." And that laugh."What? Ya get nervous around girls when they're up close?" Give him the production. Enough for the fat old assholes and the toothless dipshits with their fingers twisted in their dirty jeans to watch with hate licking red light behind their eyes.

They'll never know who he is.

They call him an angel.

"I want to dance for you, _daddy_."

He says nothing. I can see it in his eyes. Not the back room where the girls' dignity gets traded for a few fistfuls of cash but the motel I rent by the month. The clerk's a gooey twenty-year-old working his way through his mom's forbearance, lives the same denial everyone else does in the face of a few kernels of mutual delusion as long as the money's good.

He watches my ass, the way it swings, the round hips in too-small skirts. A twitch is enough; a quirk in the corner of soft lips is enough; pretending you don't notice when little things you don't even care about go missing is enough. He has a face like old hamburger and a gut just starting to take hold through the layers of varsity quarter-back disappointments.

Girls in the past tense. Even a cheerleader girlfriend who made it to college but not this one. A life sitting in an office stale with cigarette smoke and yellowed tiles and a dented bell's flat _ding_ when time comes to serve.

The room is a few square feet of bad Kinkade knockoffs against the peeling wallpaper color of babyshit and a threadbare yellow armchair and a queen-sized bed with a horrible faded blue bedspread and carpeting the texture of day-old rice you don't dare touch with your bare feet. I wiped down the bathroom with its cracked mirror and half-broken fixtures with bleach and the tiles are still checkerboards of white porcelain and the dregs of dead mold.

He follows behind me because I can see the need in his eyes.

It's not like other men's. Not like the other men's I've brought here, and exactly the same. His hand isn't on my ass but he still kicks off the same smell.

"Claire-"

"Tuesday. Or Candi. You choose, daddy." Turn with a bounce and you know his eyes see something he doesn't want to see. The way your skin shines soft with sweat and cheap creams; the shapes you're not supposed to have, the shapes he isn't expecting when he's still living the second told me the truth. Because he's not my father but I'm not crying anymore.

The curve of a shoulder and the sweep of a hip and the darkness in the eyes ringed black and the fake ring steely around my left nostril. The way I know there's the smell of a woman in the room, and only a woman. The used knotted rubbers wrapped loose in toilet paper in the dirty garbage can next to the battered old bed stand with its clock radio giving off a perpetual flat red leer.

The way the shadows grow legs and swirl in light's tangle coming off the freeway just outside, ten thousand headlamps. The midget and the giant could be here, too, couldn't they?

"This is their kind of place, isn't it, daddy?" He knows what I means even if he won't say it. He doesn't want them here, the way the guys with rings on the right fingers in the wrong places don't want the vision of wives and daughters invading this place outside of place and time outside of time. "Sit down, daddy."

"Claire-"

"My name isn't Claire, daddy. I don't know who that is." The way you're always balancing your voice like walking heel-toe-heel-toe on a balance beam with a samurai sword's edge. "Sit down."

"Please-"

"Sit. Down."

He sits down on the armchair, exactly where I want him. Half-slouches in a way that'd kick a hat off his head if he wore one the way angels are supposed to wear them in the old black-and-white 'forties movies I catch on the shitty TV. The pizza-faced kid at least brought me a working set, swapped it with one of the other room's.

The music comes easily from a stereo warring for space with forgotten takeout on a small circular table whose brown laminate's coming off like the sticker on a way-past-new appliance. It's all faded here from the light and from time and has ten billion fingerprints of people who have been in the same place on ten billion different paths.

They all narrow to the same destination.

He knows, doesn't he?

The music's cruel and lonely, synths stirring in the dark, a forlorn woman's voice. Isolated, secluded, dead heartbeats.

I love it. I come alive here because I love the feeling of being dead, love it when Claire's gone, love it when Candi's gone, love it when the names are gone and Tuesday's yesterday and there's only my fingers, only the cock of hips, only the snap of movement. Only my hands on my skin. I'm still wearing Tuesday's set, what's it matter, and I can feel his eyes the same way.

The same way as I do every night I dance. The same way as when he sits there and does nothing, a lump of coal, a lichen on a stone, a boulder grown moss standing still for ten thousand years.

"Don't you love how I dance, daddy?" When I sweep close, when my fingers crease his knees. He jolts. I've never done this before.

I'll never do it again.

Tonight, he has Jimmy's face. My daddy's face. Vulnerable and closed-off at the same time like he's half-in and half-out of reality. Not the way his face looked with mom and exactly the same way, too.

I can feel the filmy nylon on my knees and I can feel them through my pajama bottoms tickling with the carpet, knelt there and peering through the slit in the door.

Feel my breasts are already bigger than mom's.

No.

I have tits and they're big, they're hand-filling, they spill out of mine when my top comes open and floats over to the table.

"P-please, don't-"

"You want to see me dance, don't you, daddy?" When the movement makes them shake and tremble. When I can feel his eyes on my skin, the way no other pair of eyes claws at my shoulders turning, traces my hair over my neck and down my back.

When the skirt comes away.

"Please, you can't-"

"Yes, I can. You wanted a lapdance, right? Skirt's in the way." Sink down on him.

His body's heat through his pants. Palms on my knees, ass ground on his, slow and smooth and always with that hard control. It's my body's discipline all the time.

Not tonight.

Not feeling his eyes on my back, tracing my spine's shape. The smooth curves.

His fingernails crackle on the armrests.

"You hungry, daddy?" A glance back over my shoulder. The music rolls over to something else, loud, ravenous, angry. So I slide back, too.

Loud.

Ravenous.

Angry.

His breath hitches in his throat. He's hard.

I drop a hand between his thighs.

"You like it, huh, daddy? You always taught me that kind of music wasn't right for little girls' ears." She's graveling the words and I can see her thrashing in the dark. Just like me.

Both of us in the blank half-light.

A palm smoothed over the heavy hard knot bulging in his slacks.

"You- you can't-"

"I'm on the pill, daddy. Of course I can." Who knew angels _had_ anything.

But then again, what are little girls made from?

Sugar? Spice?

I laugh because he only deserves a laugh. Because his shoulders are stiffening like everything else when my hands slide over his on the armchair and my ass cradles that bulge and he won't push me away, won't become a pillar of blue light.

Won't turn me into salt.

"I'm hungry, daddy."

"Please, don't-"

"Why don't you just push me away, then? I don't mind if you want to hurt me." I'd love it.

Stripe my skin.

Peel it from my flesh.

Flay muscle off my bones.

The turn's grease on creaking black heels.

Straddle his hips with knees against his steel-hard stomach and watch his eyes turn plaintive and sad like a child's.

"I want it, daddy."

"Claire-"

"Who's Claire, daddy?" Feel his brow against my forehead. It's hard, smooth. His body's stone under my palms. No human has a body like that; no one who's ever had to eat for sustenance instead of appearances. His breath is warm and wet on my face and smells like a cold winter night. His tie comes undone; just a little. Just enough to get open the buttons.

"Claire-"

"Who's _Claire_ , daddy? After all, I don't think a dead man can have a daughter named Claire, can he?" His eyes hurt.

I love it.

Feel it knotting in the space between my gut and my throat. Swallow and feel the spit drip down into my belly into nothing but a blank. Feel that shape jabbing stiff and still yielding with flesh's overstrung spring against my pussy through the panties' thin sheath.

They're drenched.

I know they are. Boggy, uncomfortable, raw against my skin and so they come away. Feel my heels sharp against my ass when I come back down again.

"Daddy, touch me-"

"Please, don't-"

"You're going to have to push me away if you don't want it. Every man's mouth lies, daddy. The only way you know a guy's telling the truth is through his hands." Feel his stubble under my palms.

Jimmy, Daddy, he never had that.

The only time I'd ever seen it was when he surfaced out of that week-long torpor sick and retching like a scream reverberating through the house, mom's face tight, My god, isn't he ever going to stop? I need to help your daddy back to bed.

I was seven.

"Please-"

"Push me away."

"Please." His hands are hot on my wrists; they tighten my whole body like he's lacing me up to popping. He could crush me like a bag of pulp with bones inside.

"Yes. Yes."

"I'm trying-"

"Hurt me, then, daddy. Hurt me. Shove me off and hurt me. You're going to have to hurt me." Kiss him. Try to kiss him. Dip down and his his lips are so close. His chin. His cheek. His fingers are weak.

Getting limp on my wrists when nothing else is.

"Hurt me. Come on, daddy. I'm so close to you, aren't I? Wrecking your suit." Feel the coarse fabric against my skin wearing nothing more than the same lie he does.

"Please, don't do this." His plea doesn't sound like his voice before. Not flat and blank, the non-recognition of seeing an ant call you his daughter.

"Please? There's no _please_. Daddy doesn't ask _please_ , does he?" His skin tastes like a man's, too. A tinge of sweat. Sharp and like tears.

Kiss his cheek.

Down his forehead and up his jaw 'til I can feel his hair against my eyes, his ear in my mouth. Tongue trailing over the shell.

"You were hard watching me, right, daddy? I want you." If he won't push me away, then his hands belong to me. Tug them up on my hips.

They stay there. The fingers are perfect, strangely smooth like a woman's, untarnished by calluses.

Of course angels don't get calluses.

They don't have halitosis.

They don't make mistakes, do they?

It was all destined from the beginning, wasn't it?

"This isn't right-"

"Of course it's right. You're not my father, are you?" Feel his body go rigid when the words drip into his ear. Like poison. My tongue wrapped around a lobe. Pull it into my mouth and his shoulders harden like lead setting in water. "That's what you told me, daddy.

"I love it when you watch me. It gets me wet. You can feel it, right?" His fingers don't protest when mine lace around his wrists, drag them over my ass, feel the cool tight skin, down, down, down.

Downstairs where our souls both belong.

He's no angel.

I never want to be.

It's a slug in the solar plexus when his fingers reach my pussy's edges. Men don't touch like that; never so gently; never with that sense of wonderment and fear. It's arrogant, taking, it belongs to them, right?

By fucking right, doesn't it?

Not to him. Not when I feel the twitch and tremor, the orgasmal second when those smooth pads creep over the hot lips greasy with the moment.

"Touch me, daddy. Don't you love touching me? You always want it, don't you, when I'm up on stage? They eat me alive. They're fucking me with their eyes when I'm up there, daddy. They have my panties off around my ankles and they can't even imagine more than that but they try.

"You can see it in their heads, can't you? I wonder what you've seen." The ten thousand images.

Fingers dimpling my thighs.

On my knees, ramming it down my throat.

How many times?

"You- please-"

His fingers are moving now, because that's what the flesh does. The bitter instincts from the Garden burned down, our souls cast out here, because we're not supposed to be happy. That's the real lesson. God brought us close to joy so we can only admire it from afar like the sun, feel its heat on our cheeks without the warmth.

Teasing over those lips and the fingertips delicately creasing between them with a pop of white light in the dark between my ears and a shiver down my spine and my hips moving, too, a hand between us pulling at his zipper.

"You know what I'm saying, what I'm thinking, don't you?"

He does.

I know he does. When his cock's in my hand and it feels like a man's, the head's velvet shape against my wrist, burning hot against my skin. The first little kiss of damp like he's never even used it before.

That's what a daddy feels like, huh?

That's what mom had inside her.

Ouroboros eats itself.

Kronos eats his children.

What do angels eat?

"Please, you can't-"

"Then why don't you hurt me, daddy?" I love the look in his eyes because they're the same as mine. When I feel the first slippery stroke between those lips. When the sensation torches skin and chars my nerves and I want us together. Want him inside me and especially want him to cry.

I want him to sob and weep and more than anything I just want his voice in my ears.

When it catches and his breath hitches in his throat and mine's in _my_ throat. It figures he'd be too big, too fucking big, wide raw skin without a condom's oily skein and without that aroma of latex in my nose and without anything but my body, my sweat, his.

"Please-"

"You don't need to say _please_ , daddy." Falling. More. More. He's inside me now, pushing apart what feels like a hot oiled silk straitjacket. I crush him and he crushes back against me, head scraping its path up and up and up until it's cradled in my belly.

His hips against mine. I can feel the wetness drip out, smear him.

"What were you expecting, daddy?" Kiss him and he doesn't move away now. His lips taste like raspberries and his mouth opens when he feels my tongue's sharp flick at his perfect teeth hard and white like fresh polished ivory and his body moves because he's a man, isn't he?

An angel is a man.

But man and woman can't become angels.

I fuck him and his fingers dimple my hips, run smooth down my thighs, tease the meridian between my stockings and my bare skin and slide over my ankles and toy with the heels and back up again, higher, higher. The world rocks and he frays my nerves and it's all sweet confusion and gold lightning in my tummy.

He lets me move, lets my hips' slow roll swallow him to the root and pull away and hit a rhythm, galloping faster and faster and faster.

I see it in his eyes. In those sharp blue eyes, the same as mine. Mom's were never like that.

A hot iron fist wrapped around my gut. Orgasm comes like a hammer to the back of your neck, like death, like falling deeper, deeper, deeper in a black place where the breath leaves your lungs and won't come back. Black nails arered tracts down his cheeks but there are no wounds, and no blood, because he has no blood but he has a cock, his cock's inside me, tightens my nerves 'til they're breaking, sends electricity racing hot out through my arms and legs and sends the little hairs standing up and I want him even more.

I want him even more inside me. I want him to fuck me.

"Fuck me, daddy. Fuck me. Fuck me!" I want him on top of me, rutting like all the other men, all the other idiots with their blank stuffed animal eyes. He won't. His fingers bite into my skin, torture me because I'm all flesh and nothing else, crease my shoulders and my arms and slink down my hips guilty and afraid and feel him start to harden even more.

If you can make steel turn to stone, that's what it feels like.

Feel all the words and the tears and the spit and gloom boil down to a crust and finally split apart and crack and turn to steam and vapor roaring down my elbows and knees and tightening my toes in my shoes and my nipples hard and screaming against his shirt's rough fabric and his skin's hairless sleek heat and his tie's silkiness against my shoulder.

Fold myself against him like a little girl, except I'm not little, except he's not the soul he should be in the man he still is, tits flattened against his chest, his nipples vague little pinpricks of sensation, discrete points of light in a big misty constellation wrapping tight in a constricting web around my fucking head and I want him, want him to move faster, so I do instead.

Hear my hips wet and slapping against his and his cock puffing up, more, more, more.

His voice like gravel in my ears.

"S-stop, stop-"

"No." I come. Come and come and come and it screams up my spine and settles down in my hips and tightens and pulsates and he's melting inside me, everything so fucking hard it should break and then it does. Palpitating and kicking off a white wave of heat and my eyes want to close, the lids are a thousand pounds, and I don't let them.

Stare into those clear cold blue puddles going muzzy and stupid and he doesn't understand, he's like a child, and he can hear it, can hear his cum gushing inside of me, gloppy scalding like jellied hellfire and slopping out and fanning over his hips and staining his pants and I kiss him.

Kiss him and swallow the words, the apologies, the fear, let it all roll through me like the last rumble of thunder in the storms I'd watch tear at the old maple tree outside my bedroom window.

Suck down breath ripe with us, with cum's brine. Feel him shrink slowly and inexorably inside me 'til it's soft enough to pull away, let the thick oozing pearls glop out of me and patter on his skin, a rheumy string still linking us together until it sags and breaks. His cock's enameled to his hard stomach; his face is black with my lips.

"Don't you love me, daddy?"

He says nothing.

"I love you." He won't meet my eyes.

Light crawls from the interstate over my shoulders and I wish he was crying. Instead, he still has my eyes, and I have his.


End file.
